You are not using a standards compliant browser. Because of this you may notice minor glitches in the rendering of this page. Please upgrade to a compliant browser for optimal viewing:
FirefoxInternet Explorer 7Safari (Mac and PC)

A med & grad student who used to work the line in LA, NYC, SF and Napa talking about the science of cooking and cooking with science. Harold McGee's On Food And Cooking - The Science and Lore of the Kitchen never satisfied my kitchen curiosity and more than one Chef grew exasperated with my asking "Why?" I'll try to stay on topic, but you may see a kvetch or two about the school & hospital.

My posts are presented as opinion and commentary and do not represent the views of LabSpaces Productions, LLC, my employer, or my educational institution.

Well, so emr software has it's problems, not like making them public wouldn't cause them any more trouble as it normally would in a paranoid mind, as this yannisguerra's perspective here. I've delv. . .Read More

Your posts always make me so hungry and its 9am! I saw that amazon now has reruns of "The French Chef" available for streaming. It made me want to go back and check some of them out. I remember. . .Read More

I feel your pain. It is really bad. Even worse when half of those pages are non important informations (like 5 copies of the same lab, including who ordered it, when, where, etc)
So wastefu. . .Read More

Apparently some of the French have decided that restaurant menus should note when items have been prepared from frozen, processed and canned goods versus fresh. A very interesting, and curious concept. I'm pretty sure if something similar were proposed in the US, chain restaurants would be up in arms as so very little of their products are prepared fresh and on site. This is to keep costs down and maintain equivalent quality. But there are also very good preserved foods that come out of jars (and some cans) - sardines and olives for example. For the non-Francophones in the audience, a translation can be found here.

If you haven't heard, the FDA decided first to not regulate antibiotics use in the meat packing industry. They then reversed their position and decided to regulate an entirely small group of antibiotics used in animal agriculture. M . . . More

I feel really bad for doing another "Tasting Menu," but I started working with someone I admire a whole lot in my spare time. It's eating into my writing time. Well, that and the fact that I have all these things I'm trying to write introductions for and I hate the intros I come up with right now. I think I killed a dozen last week.

First "course" is a bit on how what the mother eats during pregnancy can influence a child's palate. This is actually really interesting and supports some other work done at Monell and INRA on how child's taste preferences are formed early on.

Over on Grist is a thought provoking piece on flavor and nutrition. There's a common belief that taste buds are linked to finding nutritious foods, but no one has ever really looked at nutrition of a food and its flavor. Currently the USDA doesn't differentiate, nutritionally, between an AgBiz tomato and one grown by a small farm. But, the green market/small farm tomato tastes better than the mealy, watery, tasteless things that hit supermarket shelves.

This week's tasting menu is started off by Mark Bittman at the New York Times, who toured a "traditional" pig farm in Iowa. Traditional in the sense that they don't use antibiotics, the pigs aren't penned and the crops he does grow are rotated. I'd like to note that farms like these aren't the ones receiving much of the federal farm subsidies. Most of that money goes to factory farms. A pity. Farms like these are doing good things.

The LA Times has a bit on bluefin tuna farming. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds, if it can be beneficial or just as harmful as some large scale salmon farming has been.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has released their annual Xtreme Eating Awards. And the...big...winners (?) include The Cheesecake Factory with their "Ultimate Red Velvet Cheesecake" at a whopping 1,540 Calories and 59g of saturated fat as well as their Farmhouse Burger (1,530 Cal and 36g sat fat), Coldstone Creamery's PB&J Shake (1,590 Cal & 42g sat fat) and Mo . . . More

This is a collection of stuff other people got to before I ever did. I may visit these later on for something more in depth, but why let it all just sit around? I may have RT'ed some of these on twitter. Apologies if you're reading it twice.